I'm not sure I agree that the gracefulness is the same. One situation that comes to mind is when you want to populate the elements of a hash with the passed arguments:

sub add_person {
  my %person = ();
  @person{qw(firstname lastname addr1 addr2 city state zip)} = @_;
  ...
}
[download]

vs.

sub add_person {
  my %person = ();
  $person{firstname} = shift;
  $person{lastname} = shift;
  $person{addr1} = shift;
  $person{addr2} = shift;
  $person{city} = shift;
  $person{state} = shift;
  $person{zip} = shift;
  ...
}
[download]

The first one just seems a lot cleaner to me. (Of course, in practice you might have the list of field names in a predefined array that you could loop through, but you get the idea.)

--Kevin